Interesting Subject

Interesting questions about the finances connected to long term car storage.  Hopefully someone with information about this subject will share their knowledge.  You may also want to ask Trains magazine.

Yep, cars are put in long term storage for many reasons.  Seasonal use (such as grain hoppers), market changes, etc.

If you have the track space a storage line would be an interesting subject to model.  
 

Joe

Storage

As with everything, it depends.  A lot of it depends on whether the cars are loaded or empty, system or private, home or foreign.

Home cars on home rails are not being charged.  TTX equipment stored on a railroad that is a member of TTX is generally "free".  Private on a railroad is generally charged.

How much depends on a lot of things.  Storing cars for customers is generally a low rate or possibly free, because the railroad stores the cars in order to get the line haul of the loads.  Shortlines might store cars for non-customers at a higher rate just to have a spot to put cars during downturns in business.

Most of the leases are for a length of track for a period of times (months or years).  The railroad might charge $1 a foot for a year and a customer might lease 5000 ft.  The railroad keeps track of how many feet of cars are placed in storage.  In most cases the railroad doesn't assign a specific track, it will put cars from many lessees in tracks in a yard. or siding, as they come available to store.

Some of the above may also depend on what the lease contract specifies on releasing the cars.  On plastic load storage in transit (SIT) the released loads are switched out daily.  On a cut of empty tank cars shoved out on a branch, they were switched out once a week. On surplus cars due to an economic downturn they might not be touched for months or years.  Obviously the railroad will not mix long term storage cars with SIT cars.

storage income?

  I read where the local shortline budget projected "almost $60,000 " income from storage and movement of 100 freight cars . It didn't say how much was storage and how much was from moving the cars in and out . $60,000  divided by 100cars = $600 per car per year or about $1.64 per car per day. So the small amount per car per day  adds up to decent money. :> ) .....DaveB

Lease

That's about $10 a foot per year.

cost of track

This got me wondering whether the storage fees come at all close to covering the cost of ownership of the track.

I tried to search around for some numbers and found various papers but didn't really get too far.

I did find one cost indicator, saying that a rule of thumb is a siding costs around $1 to $2 million a mile to construct (depending on all sorts of variables). So based on the low end of that, if you're only getting $5000 per year for a million-dollar mile of siding storage, you'd need the siding to last 200 years (with no maintenance) to get your initial investment back (with no interest). 

So I guess my answer is 'no', and there's probably little rail built on purpose for storage, but if you have a siding that you shouldn't have built and (now) don't need then using it for parking at least gets some money out of it.

Edit: I don't think the million bucks included the cost of the right of way, either. And any property taxes are left out as well.

fees come at all close to covering the cost ?

All the car storage I've seen has been on unused lines , old branches or yards not used any more. I don't think it was planned as such, just a way to make a bit of money from the existing surplus track....DaveB

Here's a purpose-built car

Here's a purpose-built car storage yard near Sunray, Texas:

Big Rail Yard
https://maps.app.goo.gl/PJ1PpvViwXvjA2xA6

Storage

Sure there is, south Texas has purpose built storage yards all over the place.  It makes a difference what the cars are being stored for.

Here is a purpose built car storage yard.

The railroad doesn't make diddley off the storage fees, enough to cover track maintenance, but every one of those cars represents a revenue move to get them to storage and $5000-$8000 revenue when shipped.  Every night they ship out 25-50 cars out of that yard, for $125,000-$400,000 in revenue.  That's where the money is.

Unused car storage

One of the sort of local shortlines (Pioneer Valley RR) here stored a bunch of unused cars on an unused section of line a few years ago.  They came in in batches, I’m not sure how they left.

I think there’s a big difference between storing unused empty cars, and the storage in transit plastic yards for plastic pellet cars.

A while back I seem to recall a discussion on car storage here including one of the guys who has worked for the prototype who described needing to dig specific cars out of storage on occasion.  Try searching for car storage on MRH and you get a lot of a very different sort of storage though.

Switching stored cars

Switching of stored cars in and out of storage, as I said before, can range from daily to weekly to not for months or years at a time.  It all depends on the cars and the terms of the storage.

The cars we switched weekly were empty chemical tank cars and were stored for the industries around Houston.  They were stored on about 2-3 miles of a former branch on the SW side of Houston.  Since it required a special train (with extra engines to pull the 2 miles of tank cars off the branch) it was only done weekly.  These cars were stored based on the demand for the chemicals the cars were assigned to haul.

Sometimes cars are stored for seasonal downturns or seasonal traffic.  Grain cars are a classic example.  When grain isn't moving, there will be miles of grain cars stored.  These cars will be stored for months and won't be switched out until the season comes back.

Sometimes cars are stored for plant outages or production interruptions.  Empty coal sets will be stored when mines or utilities go down for maintenance or as a result of something breaking.  Auto racks are stored when the auto plants change tooling for a new model and auto production drops.  Intermodal cars will be stored during Chinese New Year when the Asian ports shut down for the holiday.  These cars will be stored for "short" terms (weeks to months), then the interruption or outage ends.

Sometimes cars are stored due to larger shifts in the economy or business.  When the price of natural gas dropped, power plants shifted from coal to gas and thousands of coal cars were idled and stored.  During the recession, when home construction tanked, there were miles of centerbeam lumber cars stored.  These cars are long term stored (months to years) and will rarely be switched out until the ecomomy recovered or the cars can be repurposed to a different service.

Sometimes cars are stored until they can go through an upgrade or rebuilding program.  The cars will be accumulated and then switched out as the program can accept cars into the program.  This can be at a contract shop or at a railroad shop.

When empty foreign cars are stored, the cars become the commodity and the railroad can charge for moving the empty car to and from the storage location.

Storage time and methods

As usual a lot of nice to know info in this thread already.

You just gotta love a big rail yard that goes by the name "Big Rail Yard".

I often wondered about seasonal freight cars like the covered hopper unit trains during harvest time. It's interesting that they can sit idle for months then I suppose pay for themselves and make a profit during harvest. Railroads aren't growing anything or using it at the other end but are making money for simply moving the grain, and apparently some pretty big money at that, though it probably isn't all that simple when you're doing it.

I'm thinking I might set up a track as I rebuild into layout version 2.0 for car storage. I'm modeling a fictional short line using an amalgam of several prototypes I've seen over the years and figure I can have room for a lone track along one wall that no longer leads to anywhere productive. Take some lessons from MRH articles, blogs, and forum threads to make a rusty old spur with weeds coming through what's left of the roadbed and ballast.

Buy several of the same car at once and haven't gotten around to weathering them yet? Park them on your storage track for a fictional fee. They can be admired and prototypically correct at the same time.

Idle cars

Actually having cars sit for long periods isn’t cost effective.  That’s why railroads own fewer and fewer cars. Railroads go to “shuttle” trains in the harvest season where the train has to be loaded and unloaded in 24 hrs and the power stays with the trains.  You can haul at least twice as much grain with the same number of cars.  Plus with ethanol, corn syrup and feeder trains that run all year, the demand evens out.  If you are modeling pre-1990’sthen there will be way more stored grain cars than a modern road. 

Car Storage Yard

Is that the yard used for storing loaded covered hoppers filled with various grades and types of plastic pellets?

Basically a warehouse on rails, where when a hopper load or more is sold, the owner tells the railroad which car(s) to retrieve and forward on to their new destination?  

A friend of mine whoi used to work for the Santa Fe

before the merger referred to empty well cars or stack cars as "bare tables."  I think it was in 2020 that imports were way down due to covid protocols.  The BNSF had a lot of empty well cars with no containers coming in or going out for them.  They parked the empty cars on sidings in the desert until shipping started up again and the well cars were needed to transfer loads in and out of the harbor once again.

Baretables

Baretables is still the term used by BNSF for empty intermodal cars and trains, although the term can also be used on trains loaded with empty containers. The train symbol prefix for baretable trains is B, as in B-ALTOMA1-01A (Baretable Alliance to Omaha).

As far as the cars are concerned, the railroad only sees two types of well cars: BTBIG and BTSMALL. BTBIG is any well car with 53' or larger wells. All other wells are considered BTSMALL, since 40', 45' and 48' wells cannot load 53' containers in the well. When you're switching these cars out the only concern is whether they can hold a 53' container in the well or not.

BNSF uses the baretable train as rolling storage in addition to using them to balance the supply of wells, containers and chassis. We used to see them in my area going to outlying sidings or yards for short-term storage (i.e., a couple of days), but I haven't seen that in a while. Occasionally one will stay in Purcell, Oklahoma for a couple days, but it's rare now. Five years ago it was much more frequent.

SIT

Correct.  The yard has over 1000 loaded covered hoppers of plastic.  Teh plastics manufactures set up their plants to make a run of so many tons of a particular specification of plastic pellet or resin.  They load the run into covered hoppers and ship them to the SIT (storage in transit) yard.  The inbound loads are placed in the tracks as room allows.  There could be hundreds of grades of plastic from a dozen different manufacturers.  Each manufacture leases a certain footage of track in the yard.   There is no attempt to segregate the cars by manufacturer or by product.  They are all shoved in together.  

When a company needs to by a carload of pellets or resin they call the manufacturer who sells them a car, then selects one of their cars, and bills it to the company.  The billing accumulates through the day and then after business hours/5 pm, the switcher runs lists of the tracks and identifies the cars billed outbound.  They spend the rest of their shift cherry picking out the cars from the yard.  The outbounds are then lined up for through freights to pick up and go to destination.  Cars may sit in the yard for a day or they may sit there for over a year.  Just depends on the demand for the product in the car.

There are dozens of those types of yards all over S Texas.  

Great Western

Back in the '80s and '90s, the Great Western Railway in Colorado, once owned by the sugar beet processing company of the same name, stored many boxcars for Evans Leasing at the rate of 60 cents a day.  That worked out to about $3.65 per foot per year.  Most of the cars were the famous "Blue Island reefers",  double-plug-door insulated boxcars often built to haul lumber and plywood.

Just about every unused piece of track on the Great Western was stuffed full of boxcars back then.  I guess they were eventually all scrapped.

Scott Chatfield 

  "south Texas has purpose

That must be a regional thing. I can't recall any purpose built storage yards around central ca.  Mergers and traffic patterns left plenty of semi abandoned branchline surplus yard space around the area to store un-used cars. .....DaveB  

SIT yards

SIT yards cater to plastic manufacturers, its nothing but chemical plants from New Orleans to Corpus Christi.

SIT yards

They sell the railroad car to the purchasing company, not just the carload? 

Or am I reading too much into your phrasing?

Car load

They buy the load in the car. Buying “a car” or buying “a train” refers to a quantity, not the physical car or train.  Sorry for the confusion.

Tourist line revenue

One of the tourist operations in Canada (Prairie Dog Central in Manitoba) has a former CN branchline that runs north out of Winnipeg.  The line used to service gypsum mines in the interlake region until the mid 1990's.  The line was cut back to Warren and taken over by Prairie Dog Central.

They operate the tourist train between Winnipeg and Grosse Ile and use the remaining track between Grosse Isle and Warren for car storage.  Last time I was through the area they had long strings of tank cars stored.  They were earning roughly $0.50 per car per day.  There is enough business that they purchased an ex-CN SD40 and created a subsidiary ( Prairie Rail Solutions) to run the operation.  It seems like a good way to help keep your tourist operation going, especially given the situation over the past couple of years. 

What seemed like miles and miles...

Of tank cars, in the weeds, sitting alongside the highway in the South Fork region of Colorado.  I was on a seemingly endless transit between Albuquerque, NM and Denver, CO, so I may have the site mixed up with somewhere else.  Tried to whittle it down via Google Maps, to discover the same situation had been scanned by satellite, but with open hoppers, from South Fork to near Hanna, on the eastern approach to Wolf Creek Pass.

Tim B.

Shell games with cars

I remember quite a few times switching out lease cars ( intermodal) vs company owned cars. Say there was a downturn in traffic, but the yard had 2 cars one leased (TTX ,etc) and 1 company owned. Depending on how long the leased car had been in the yard, sometime we would switch them out for storage and use the company owned cars for outbound trains. Or the opposite would happen, company cars into storage and leased cars into service.

The irony was day 1 pull a bare table train to storage, the next day same train was brought back from storage. Sometimes it didn't even make it to the storage location less than 100 miles away.

What I came to learn from the yardmaster was dwell time. I can't remember the rules at the moment but it was something like 48 or 72 hours that a car could "dwell" without movement or being charged. So on paper at 73 hours the lease company needed find storage because the car hadn't been used. If the car hadn't been moved after a set time, the leasing company could charge the RR fees for cars not in service. The leasing company couldn't find anyone that needed the car so the RR would "return" the car to the leasing company. The leasing company in turn didn't have storage space...

So the RR would offer up a storage spot for X amount of money and begin processing the move the take place at hour 72.... Knowing full well that in 74 hours that car would be needed. So the next shift/day a request would go to the leasing company for cars...

Apparently according to the yardmaster that explained this one night to me was making the company around thousands of dollars per car for storage. I never really understood it but this was a whole new level of complexity I still don't quite completely understand. 

Point being sometimes storage of cars can be hours...

Intermodal seemed to me the most often in and out of short term storage. Specialty cars like tank or centerbeams seemed to be stored for longer periods. One of the ways to "watch" the economy is railcar storage and observing what cars are where and for how long. If they suddenly disappear, there's been a rebound in that sector.